New setback in the health of King Harald of Norway. As reported this Wednesday, January 31, the royal house in a brief statement – which He has only published in Norwegian on the official website of the royal family—, the sovereign is on sick leave due to a respiratory tract infection, for which he has had to suspend his schedule for a few days. Harald V, 86, will stay away from the official events he had planned until next February 2 and it will be his son, Crown Prince Haakon, who in the coming days will act as regent and take charge of the activities. his father's.
Harald of Norway, the only ruler in Europe who has been on the throne since the 20th century after Margaret of Denmark abdicated this January, had planned an official lunch this Wednesday in which he was replaced by his son. This afternoon, Haakon of Norway and his mother, Queen Sonja, will host a reception at the Royal Palace to mark the inauguration of the 750th anniversary of Magnus Lagabøte's Land Law. Next Friday, his son will also have to replace him in several audiences that the monarch had to attend, among them with the United States ambassador or the foreign minister.
In recent months, the king, who will turn 87 on February 21, has been hospitalized on several occasions. Last May he was admitted for an infection; a new hospitalization that was added to two others suffered by the monarch in less than a year. On those occasions, as now, he was replaced in his royal duties by his son. In October 2020, the king underwent heart surgery to replace a valve placed in 2005 in open heart surgery. Covid also took him to the hospital in March 2022, and another time it was for knee surgery.
Despite health problems, his mobility problems and his age, in no case has Harald from Norway thought about a possible abdication, at least that is what he says in public. On the throne since January 1991 after the death of his father, King Olav V, at the age of 87, he himself recently took it upon himself to settle any speculation about a possible departure from the throne. On January 23, when asked by journalists during an event at the Faktisk media organization in Oslo, whether he had ever thought about abdicating as Queen Margaret had just done, he replied: “I stand by what I have said all day. time. I have taken an oath to the Storting [el Parlamento noruego] and it is for life,” said King Harald, referring to the promise he made to Parliament when he acceded to the throne at age 53. In 2019, Crown Prince Haakon, who turned 50 last July, spoke about what it meant to replace his father at specific times: “So far, I think we have managed the work quite well together. I look at it as if we were a team. We distribute the work to achieve the best possible result. “I think we will continue to do it like this in the years to come,” said someone who has an increasingly tighter official agenda.
The next event that appears on the official agenda of the king, who has already spent 33 years on the Nordic throne, is scheduled for February 4, when he has to attend the national rifle championship in Stjørdal.
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